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The Marketing Millennials is a look inside what’s working right now for other marketers. No theory. No fluff. Just real insights and ideas you can actually use—from marketers who’ve been there, done that, and are sharing the playbook.
Every newsletter is written by Daniel Murray, a marketer obsessed with what goes into great marketing. Expect fresh takes, hot topics, and the kind of stuff you’ll want to steal for your next campaign.
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Beyond the Newsletter with Fractional ABM
Beyond the newsletter, I occasionally work with B2B SaaS teams, typically Series A through C, who are building or rebuilding their ABM motion with or without a full-time person in seat. If you're in that situation, or heading toward it, reply to this email.
Happy to talk through what you're working on.
Open LinkedIn on any given day and here's the ABM advice you'll see:
Tier your ICP. Layer firmographics on top. Aggregate the right signals. Scale personalization with AI.
None of it is wrong. I'm even building my own version of an always-on program at Sphera right now.
The sharpest content on this assumes business alignment as the starting point. Plenty of what gets shared doesn't.
But almost none of it answers the question that decides whether any of it works:
What business priority is this ABM strategy actually supporting?
Not "what's the ABM strategy." What's the business need the strategy exists to serve.
At Sphera, our priority this year is cross-sell expansion in our top customer accounts. Every ABM decision I make (account selection, messaging, sales alignment, channel mix) sits downstream of that priority.
Without it, account selection is still broad in nature. Signals are noise. AI just scales the wrong thing faster.
With it, every one of those tactical decisions has an obvious answer.
The priorities that actually anchor a strong ABM motion
The business priorities that produce real ABM alignment are usually one of:
Cross-sell expansion in your customer base
Enterprise expansion (taking the product up-market)
Vertical expansion (breaking into a new industry TAM)
Market expansion (breaking into a new geographic market)
Product launch support (getting a new capability into the right accounts fast)
Any one of these can be the priority for a strong ABM motion.
What can't be the priority: "we do ABM."
That's not a priority. That's a category label.
Why this alignment matters
The reason this alignment matters isn't philosophical. It's operational.
Sales won't stay engaged with an ABM motion they can't tie to a revenue story. They'll nod in the QBR and run their own list the next week.
The CMO won't fund the second year of an ABM investment they can't tie to a business outcome. They'll cut the budget when the next planning cycle hits.
Marketing will keep making tactical decisions that look sound in isolation but never compound into anything because there's no target to compound toward.
The business priority is the through-line that makes all of it hold together.
The alignment audit I'm describing is the same one I run when I step into an ABM program, the diagnostic I've built over a decade in operator seats at Movable Ink, Clari, and now Sphera. I'm making that same work available to a small number of teams as a Fractional Head of ABM this year.
This framing assumes a priority stable enough to concentrate against for 12+ months. If yours shifts quarterly, ABM likely isn't the right instrument for that season anyway.
The one-sentence test
If you're building or fixing an ABM program right now, here's the honest test:
If a new stakeholder joined your GTM leadership team tomorrow and asked "what business outcome is your ABM program driving?" could every person at the table answer the same way in one sentence?
If yes, the tactical questions get easier. Account selection, sales alignment, signals, AI, they all become downstream decisions with clear right answers.
If no, that's where I'd start. Before I built the always-on system. Before I chased another AI experiment. Before I re-tiered the account list.
Everything else compounds on the answer to that one question.
Naming the priority is necessary but not sufficient. Next week I'll walk through the operational discipline that keeps the alignment honest across a year of tactical decisions.
If you're wrestling with which business priority your ABM program should be anchored to hit reply. I'd love to hear what you're weighing.
What did you think about this week's newsletter?
